Ridiculously Pretty Paper Products from Minted Giveaway

This post and giveaway are sponsored by Minted, but all words and opinions are mine!

Hope you all had a very merry Christmas! We had a lovely quiet holiday filled with unhealthy (but delicious) food, Christmas movie classics, and tons of fun presents. We have a quick (and rather exciting if I do say so myself) post for you today, and then we're off to Catalina Island for a New Years vacation with a bunch of friends. Since we haven't thrifted anything this week, we'll be taking a break from the Nifty Thrifty while we're away, but we'll be back next week!

I was very excited the other day to receive an email from Minted about sponsoring a post (and giveaway! keep reading...), as I spent a lot of time cruising their site for ideas when I was thinking about our wedding invites and I know they have some great stuff. Basically, Minted culls the best work from independent designers around the world, and then you get to choose from their amazing selection of beautiful save the date cards, unique wedding invitations (even some letterpress ones! mmm letterpress), and pretty much everything you could possibly imagine a stationary company might make for your wedding. BUT, even though I had it in my head that Minted was all about weddings, as I pored through their website I discovered that they also carry gorgeous cards for every occasion, a huge variety of personalized paper and photo products, and even art prints and party decor! Who knew?

I've made a few forays into stationery making in the last year, first with our DIY save the dates, then our wedding invitations designed by a friend and printed by us, and most recently the holiday cards we printed from my Christmas cactus gouache painting. When I'm not making my own cards, I like to support independent stationery companies, partly on principle, but mostly because the designs they make are generally WAY more interesting and beautiful than Hallmark stuff. Plus, sometimes you just don't have the time, skills, or supplies to make what you want. I've found a few stores in my area that carry small selections of cool indie cards, but Minted takes it to a whole new level with tons of options and crazy personalization. For example, I didn't know I needed personalized stationery, but yeah... I think I do now.

Their website is super easy to navigate, and I spent way too long looking through all the lovely designs, so I definitely recommend checking it out yourself. Also, make sure you stop at the voting page, where you can help determine which new designs Minted will sell. It's rather addictive, looking through all the possibilities for a given challenge and rating each design... in fact, just now when I went to grab the link to write this, I fell into the rabbit hole again and voted on a bunch of business cards. Too much fun. Anyway, to get you started, here are some a ton of my favorite (currently available) Minted designs to pique your interest:

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Because if you didn't get around to sending holiday cards this year, it's still not too late for a "Happy New Year" card! Also, they have a whole section of newlywed holiday cards that made me a little sad we missed our chance at using one of them, as much as I loved our card this year. I am personally a "card person" (as in, I love getting and giving cards... Chris just does not understand how important the card is), and most of Minted's cards have personalization options that would make me feel so special, knowing that someone went out of their way ordering a card especially for me. Many of their cards (and products in general, except the wedding stuff) seem to be more aimed at families with children, with prominently displayed personal photos, and since we don't have kids yet those ones aren't quite our style... but maybe they will be someday, once we have little ones we want to show off! For now, my favorites mostly involve pretty botanicals, fun typography, and hand-drawn details.

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Just because our wedding is over doesn't mean I can't ogle all the pretty wedding stationary! The wedding section is probably still my favorite part of Minted, as there are just so many great options and it makes me all nostalgic for those crazy planning days. If you don't have an awesome artist friend to design your invitations, or if you don't want to deal with printing them yourself, definitely check these out. I love how you can choose the shape of the paper for most of these--I'm all about those rounded corners. So many lovely save the dates and invitations, along with every other wedding paper product you could imagine, and even a bunch of decor items, like that personalized bunting banner!

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I was amazed how much other random stuff I now feel like I need after digging through the Minted website... not sure if that's a good thing. You've got personalized stationery (don't know what I'd use it for, but I want it!), journals, calendars (mostly customized photo calendars), awesome wrap around return address labels, business cards, and a huge variety of art prints, both customized and regular. It's surprisingly inexpensive to add a frame, which is always a nice touch. There is seriously a ton more on Minted, but these are my favorites!

So, you want in on the action? Well, lucky you, because the lovely folks at Minted agreed to give away a $50 credit to one of our readers!

Update: This giveaway has ended. Congratulations to Meredith!

A couple simple steps to enter this giveaway:
1. Go to minted.com and pick one favorite product (I know, choosing just one will be difficult. But don't worry, if you win you can use your credit towards anything! This part is just for fun.)
2. Leave a comment here telling us what you liked best! Make sure there's a way for us to contact you if you win (link to your blog, include an email, etc), because if we can't contact you, we'll have to select another winner, and that would be sad.
3. You can earn extra entries by sharing a link to this post on twitter, facebook, and pinterest (one extra entry for each share). For the extra entries, just comment with a link to your share.

Enter by 1/6/14, and we'll randomly select and contact the winner on the 7th! It's not required to enter, but we would love it if you would follow our blog, through facebook, twitter, google friend connect, by email, or however you choose (lots of options in the sidebar over there to the right!).

Have a very happy new year everyone, and we'll see you in 2014!